For those who don’t get the joke: benzos are depressants, and will (temporarily) significantly reduce your cognitive function if you take enough to have amnesia.
this might not make john’s idea pointless, if the tested interventions’s effect on cognitive performance still correlates strongly with sober performance. but there may be some interventions whose main effect is to offset benzos effects whose usefulness does not generalize to sober.
Temporary implies immediately reversible and mild.
People who are on benzos often have emotional regulation issues, serious withdrawal symptoms (sometimes after very short courses potentially even a single dose), and cognitive issues that do not resolve quickly.
In an academic sense, this idea is ‘fine’, but in a very personal way, if someone asked me ‘should I take a member of this class of drug for any reason other than a serious issue that is severely affecting my quality of life?‘, I would answer ‘absolutely not, and if you have a severe issue that they might help with, try absolutely everything else first, because once you’re on these, you’re probably not coming off’.
yeah, agreed—benzos are on my list of drugs to never take if I can possibly avoid it, along with opiates. By temporary, I just mean “recoverably”. many drugs society considers sus or terrible I consider mostly fine if risks are managed, but that generally involves how to avoid addiction, and means using things at non-recreational-does levels. Benzos are hard to do that with because, to my cached understanding, the margin between therapeutic and addictive doses is very small.
For those who don’t get the joke: benzos are depressants, and will (temporarily) significantly reduce your cognitive function if you take enough to have amnesia.
But Eric Neyman’s post suggests that benzos don’t significantly reduce performance on some cognitive tasks (e.g. Spelling Bee)
Yeah there are definitely tasks that depressants would be expected to leave intact. I’d guess it’s correlated strongly with degree of working memory required.
For those who don’t get the joke: benzos are depressants, and will (temporarily) significantly reduce your cognitive function if you take enough to have amnesia.
this might not make john’s idea pointless, if the tested interventions’s effect on cognitive performance still correlates strongly with sober performance. but there may be some interventions whose main effect is to offset benzos effects whose usefulness does not generalize to sober.
Temporary implies immediately reversible and mild.
People who are on benzos often have emotional regulation issues, serious withdrawal symptoms (sometimes after very short courses potentially even a single dose), and cognitive issues that do not resolve quickly.
In an academic sense, this idea is ‘fine’, but in a very personal way, if someone asked me ‘should I take a member of this class of drug for any reason other than a serious issue that is severely affecting my quality of life?‘, I would answer ‘absolutely not, and if you have a severe issue that they might help with, try absolutely everything else first, because once you’re on these, you’re probably not coming off’.
yeah, agreed—benzos are on my list of drugs to never take if I can possibly avoid it, along with opiates. By temporary, I just mean “recoverably”. many drugs society considers sus or terrible I consider mostly fine if risks are managed, but that generally involves how to avoid addiction, and means using things at non-recreational-does levels. Benzos are hard to do that with because, to my cached understanding, the margin between therapeutic and addictive doses is very small.
But Eric Neyman’s post suggests that benzos don’t significantly reduce performance on some cognitive tasks (e.g. Spelling Bee)
Yeah there are definitely tasks that depressants would be expected to leave intact. I’d guess it’s correlated strongly with degree of working memory required.